Category: 20-29

Age: 20

Location: Columbus, Ohio

When did you discover anime? I discovered anime at a very young age (in the early 2000s) because of my older half-sister Chelsea, who is eight years older than myself. She was always obsessed with Japan and anime, having countless Sailor Moon tapes and merchandise; her closet was bursting with SM dolls and figures, and she had a whole binder full of first edition, Japanese holographic Pokemon cards under her bed. I lusted over it through my whole childhood. She was so obsessive over Sailor Moon that my mother was pushed over the edge and essentially forbade the viewing of anime, and especially Sailor Moon, in any part of the house except for the basement, where she could not see or hear it. Of course, that only made me more curious about it, though I could not express that sentiment out loud. Probably out of spite for my mother, she planted the “anime seed” in me and my younger sister by showing us Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away, Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. We had no idea these movies were from another country since they were dubbed in English, though I don’t think we would have cared much. They were different from the usual coming-of-age Disney stuff we were used to, so I was fascinated with them. When Chelsea went off to college, I would look forward to her return on holidays because she would bring her DVD of Spirited Away back home. Seed successfully planted!

Fast forward a few more years and I was going through my obligatory adolescent wolf phase. I loved roleplaying wolves on forums (my OC was a black wolf named “ViperScar”) and drawing my fursona on deviantART. One day I was looking at some dank wolf art on dA and someone mentioned a show called Wolf’s Rain. So, I gave it a try, because wolves! I binged the whole thing on YouTube, with each episode uploaded in three ten-minute parts in what must have been atrocious quality. I didn’t understand all of it, but I loved it, and it made me feel mature because of all the blood. A few episodes in, I figured out it was Japanese. I didn’t want to be associated with anime since my parents hated it so much, so I rationalized that it wasn’t “real anime,” because it was dubbed in English and had an English OP/ED. I kept my interest in the show a relative secret (though I introduced it to my BFF who probably only sat through it because he had a crush on me).

My interest in this show allowed me to really bond with Chelsea; we weren’t particularly close until the summer after my fifth grade year, when she discovered I had tasted the forbidden fruit. I think she was excited to have another person to talk to about anime and Japan, even though I had only really seen one title. And I was happy to get the attention and fulfillment resulting from having an actual connection to my sister. She would take me on long drives to the nearby Japanese markets and bookstores and we would talk about anime and play Yoko Kanno tracks from a CD in her car. She also told me about the times in distant past where you would have to get anime by mailing blank tapes to strangers so they could copy shows to them and then send them back. Her stories about ’90s anime fandom were so far removed from my reality at that time that it almost seemed like some sort of mystical Tolkeinesque fantasy. I was enchanted by it. Everything was good.

A few more years passed and my parents separated. Everything was not good. He subjected me, my mother, and my younger sister Danielle to narcissistic abuse, terrorizing us in our family home every day after he got off work and then leaving suddenly to return to his girlfriend. Chelsea and my other half-sister Lindsay were living out-of-state at this time, so they didn’t have to deal with him. Everything had turned around so quickly that no one knew how to handle it. Suddenly, we had no father, no money, barely a mother (she was sick and constantly bedridden; my dad was her physician and purposefully gave her medication that would interact negatively in the body), no friends, and I was deep into clinical depression that was so far unresponsive to medication.

Because of all the turmoil, I became close with Danielle and we binged shows like Sherlock, Hannibal, Adventure Time, and Star Trek: The Next Generation together. When I was a junior in high school, I heard about an animated show called Fullmetal Alchemist, and the premise sounded interesting. There was a catch though: it was one of those forbidden Japanese cartoons! I asked Danielle if she was okay with watching an anime and she was just kind of like “sure.” We were hooked, watching the original and Brotherhood two times over the course of a month. It only made us hungry for more; that summer we watched Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Evangelion. There was a showing of Evangelion 3.33 in theatres that we had the privilege of going to and it was a religious experience. Then, I haphazardly learned how to sew by watching YouTube videos just so we could cosplay Riza Hawkeye and Maria Ross. That winter, we went to our first anime convention wearing the cosplays I so lovingly sewed together. I spent so much time on them that I actually broke my cheapo sewing machine! We were officially knee deep into anime fandom and it only snowballed from there.

To this day I have watched 274 different TV anime and am an avid cosplayer. I have gotten many other people into the medium and am even learning Japanese with great enthusiasm. Most strikingly, it has helped me deal with the treatment-resistant depression that has been slowly taking all positive feelings away from me over the years. Stories like NGE, Rurouni Kenshin, Berserk, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and The Rose of Versailles have given me a slew of interesting and multifaceted characters and situations to analyze, while things like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and One Piece allow me to smile when it seems like nothing else is worth smiling at. All of these things have brought me immense joy and remind me that I am still capable of feeling it.

I know it’s silly and cheesy to say something like this, but I am very thankful for anime. It has allowed me to connect to my family and make friends in new places, inspired me to continue making my own art, and has often made life the slightest bit easier to handle when it seems like everything is falling apart™.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? How unique the stories and characters were in comparison to what was available in the West.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Pokemon and Naruto; later, Attack on Titan.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? When I was a kid and first getting into anime, I wasn’t even that involved in a wider fandom. It was more as a teenager and an adult that I realized there even was a fandom and got more involved. And that was pretty much present day, so it wasn’t much different than now!

Do you know how your half-sister Chelsea found out about anime that led to her getting hooked on Sailor Moon? No surprisingly, no one seems to know how it started. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t into anime, and she is very secretive about her feelings and passions.

How did anime fandom lead to an interest in cosplay? How did you learn cosplay was a thing? How did cosplay make you feel? I think it was just a natural evolution of what I was doing before for Halloween, etc. I always went all out on my costumes (e.g. James Cameron’s Avatar costume in for Halloween 2010 with full-body blue paint and latex prosthetics) and enjoyed assuming the identities of fictional characters because I just didn’t like my own identity too much. I saw a lot of cosplay over the internet and I had already learned some sewing basics by the time I was getting serious about anime; It seemed like an enjoyable way to express my deep love for the things I liked while also pretending to not be me for a little bit. Cosplay was and is very empowering for me; I am a lot more animated when cosplaying and it’s fun interacting with people that have the same interests. It’s a source of validation in addition to it being a chance to show off my craftsmanship.

Do you remember your first anime con? Yes, it was Ohayocon 2014! I cosplayed Fullmetal Alchemist with my sister, but we only ended up cosplaying for one afternoon. The con seemed huge and overwhelming, especially since we were so young (I think I was 16-17 while my sister was 13-14). We couldn’t find registration to pick up our badges for the first 2.5 hours we were there, it was actually kind of a stressful experience and we didn’t really go to any panels that because the place was so hard to navigate. The day after was more enjoyable, we decided not to cosplay and were able to go to to more panels because of the time that freed up in the morning.

How does your mom feel about anime now? Does she still dislike it? It’s not something that she seeks out by any means or anything, but she does seem to have a deeper appreciation for anime since it’s helped her daughters so much. At one point, she considered writing a thank you letter to Eiichiro Oda, since One Piece helped me through a very rough part of my life and very well could have saved me.  Heck, I think she considers herself a lowkey fan of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, though a lot of that comes from the surplus of buff and attractive men in that show. Who can blame her, though!

It’s heartening to see how anime helped you bond with your sisters. Do they still watch anime today? Do you still watch together? I am living on my own now so I don’t get to see Danielle very often, but when I come home we marathon it together. I’d say it’s our main sister-bonding activity and it’s a highlight of my visits. I don’t see Chelsea very often either; she lives in Japan and is there indefinitely since she fell in love and got married there! Apparently, she doesn’t watch anime much anymore, though her husband is into it (he’s big on Attack on Titan and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure).

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I feel like I haven’t noticed any significant changes since then, I don’t think I’ve been part of anime fandom long enough to notice too much.

Alexandria can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 24

Location: United States

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. It was 2009, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, and I was barely sixteen years old. At the time, Hulu provided my main TV source and online escape from reality—and with my mental health the way it was at the time, that escape was much valued. This was in the good old days when you could have a free Hulu account and only get thirty-second commercials. Naruto popped up as a recommended show, likely because of my interest in action-adventure and fantasy shows. The description caught my attention, so I watched the first episode. And the next. And the next. The first Naruto OP still fills me with nostalgia, transporting me back to where I sat on (not at) my parents’ kitchen counter, watching my first anime late at night. With Hulu’s help, I discovered similar anime, like Inuyasha. Before long, I was hooked on anime as a medium.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The continued storylines. I felt like most American TV shows were very episodic, whereas anime would continue with the same complex storyline for dozens—or even hundreds—of episodes. I hadn’t seen these layers of conflict and character development in more than a couple other shows. Plus, the scenarios captured my attention and characters captured my heart in ways that, again, few American shows had ever managed.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Probably Naruto. I didn’t talk much with other fans during my first year of anime viewing—in fact, I can only think of three or four off the top of my head—but I remember the sites with illegal streaming often had something Naruto-related in their titles, and Naruto and Shippuden were nearly always at the top of any list sorted by popularity.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Again, I can’t comment on much that has to do with other fans for my first year of watching. But after about a year and a half, I started getting involved in fandom online, primarily on Anime-Planet. In the A-P forums, I got to know a wonderful mix of people from all over the world, folks who knew how to be welcoming and have fun—but many of whom were also willing to engage in deep discussions about things like religion. We’d play forum games, talk about anime, participate in forum signature competitions, discuss religion…

This community propelled me into aniblogging, a hobby I continue to this day. I barely know how to start telling you what it was like to be a part of this community of anime fans. I can say that Anime-Planet and the aniblogosphere encouraged me and gave me a sense of companionship during one of the loneliest, hardest times of my life.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? Yes. In addition to the forums and blogging I mentioned above, Twitter quickly became a center part of my anime experience—for me, that part started 2011, over a year and a half after I first found Naruto.

You imply that mental illness was a major part of your early anime fandom. If you’re comfortable discussing it, how did anime help you during this time? I did struggle a lot with anxiety and depression before and during my first couple years of anime fandom—and these issues exasperated ADHD symptoms that had barely bothered me before. At first, anime wasn’t exactly a help. It was an escape, and an unhealthy one at that. I would easily watch an entire 12-episode anime on a school night… multiple school nights in a row. There were times when I’d be watching anime in bed, then suddenly notice light coming in my window, alerting me that I had to be at school in just a few hours. This resulted from my lack of time management, my hyperfocus, my struggle with switching tasks, and, again, my need to escape anxiety.

When I discovered Anime-Planet, I found other fans who had similar or worse anime habits, and who pretty much boasted about how much anime they consumed at a furious rate, and about how addicted they were. I started to absorb that attitude and feel sort of proud of my anime habits—while still feeling a bit guilty.

But if it wasn’t anime, I’d have used American TV shows and books to escape the world. My anime binging habits were definitely a symptom, not a cause, of my troubles.

And anime did help. At first it was only in more shallow ways. It could make me giggle and squeal even in the depths of my depression. It stopped my racing thoughts—a temporary relief, sure, but a relief nonetheless. It provided my scattered, tangled brain with something it could actually focus on for hours at a time.

Age: 24

Location: New Mexico

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Honestly, my memories of this are very vague? I fell in love with anime in elementary school (and have been in love ever since), but I’m not sure when the shift between my liking anime that I didn’t realize was different than the cartoons I watched (i.e., Pokemon and Digimon) to my actively understanding my love of anime as me loving something called “anime” occurred. I’m not sure if I knew YuGiOh! was an anime when I started watching it. I probably knew Dragon Ball Z was, and definitely knew it by the time I started watching things like Gundam Wing and Yu Yu Hakusho. By the end of elementary school (which was 5th grade for me), I was a full-blown anime fan, relying on rentals from Hastings to introduce me to new series.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Everything? I liked the stories, the animation—everything. Unlike cartoons, anime had an overarching plot, which I loved. It didn’t hurt that I never really liked live-action television, for whatever reason.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Digimon had a universal appeal among other kids, even those who weren’t into anime/didn’t know what it was. For those of us who did, it was Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Gundam Wing. I was vaguely aware of the existence of Sailor Moon, but never saw it myself because I didn’t have the channel it was on, and, as it wasn’t until I was in 6th grade that I even met another female anime fan, it didn’t even occur to me to check if Hastings had such a girly series to watch.

How did knowing other female anime fans change the way you engaged in fandom, as opposed as when you bonded over anime with your brother? Meeting other female anime fans definitely changed how I engaged with fandom. Before, I watched anime with my brothers and his friends, and we spent a lot of time talking about it, but I also continually restricted myself in what I talked about. That is, I talked about the kinds of topics they talked about, and avoided anything that could be construed as “girly”, like when I had a crush on a particular character or was invested in a particular pairing / wished that a different pairing would happen. Sometimes I got around these constraints with a kind of personal code—i.e., saying a particular character was my “favorite” when what I really meant was “this character is super-cute and I totally have a crush.” It was all very much an attempt to just “be one of the boys” and “not like other girls,” but it also wasn’t really a conscious decision—it’s something that I only realized that I was doing when I met other female anime fans and felt free to talk about whatever caught my attention in an anime, whether that was squeeing over a particularly awesome fight scene or sighing over something especially romantic.

And I didn’t just stop with my female friends—having those friendships also left me more comfortable to talk about whatever I wanted with my brother, and, to a lesser extent, his friends. I’m not sure if I can say exactly why this was the case—like I said, much of this was a subconscious reaction from me—but if I had to guess, I’d say it’d because I had a safety net that I hadn’t had before. I no longer had to worry as much about what my brother’s friends thought of me, because I had my own friends who loved anime too. As for my brother, he’d always been my best friend: seeing that other anime fans didn’t have a problem with the more so-called “girly” parts of my interests made me more confident that he wouldn’t have a problem with it either. (And he didn’t—I’m fortunate to have a truly excellent brother.)

Looking back, being an anime fan before I met other female anime fans was characterized by a lot of tension, first in hiding my love of anime from “normal people,” and then from hiding particular aspects of my enjoyment of anime from those who remained. Meeting other female anime fans released that tension and allowed me to relax in a way I couldn’t allow myself to before.

It was also after that I met other female anime fans that I began to be drawn into online fandom, particularly fanfiction, but I’m not sure if I can say that was directly because of meeting them. I do think it accelerated the process (as it was one of those friends stumbling upon fanfiction and then showing it to me that introduced me to the concept), but I’d already been fond of writing for years, and had just begun exploring the Internet myself at home, so it’s not impossible that I would have stumbled upon it eventually. It did become a core part of our friendship, though, and one that was never shared by the male anime fans in my life.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from how it is now. A big focus was on actually getting access to various series—it was really freaking hard. My brother and I depended on rentals from Hastings and friends who had more channels than us recording bits and pieces of series for us. It was very male-dominated—like I mentioned above, I didn’t meet another female anime fan until I was in the 6th grade; before then, I relied on my brother and his friends to talk about anime with.

Also: loving anime was like, a HUGE SECRET for me. I was open enough about it with my brother and his friends, but with MY friends and classmates? Nope. Never said a word. I only met the other female anime fan in 6th grade because I vaguely described a moment “from a show I saw” in front of a new acquaintance, and SHE (who was ALSO keeping her love of anime a secret) recognized it as a moment from Yu Yu Hakusho—and then, on top of that, that revelation led to me finding out that another girl I’d been friends with since 4th grade was also obsessed with anime and video games and had been keeping it a secret. Like, we’d been good friends for over two years, and these were major hobbies for us, yet neither of us had felt comfortable enough to reveal our “secret” to one another until a series of coincidental events sent our secrets toppling down. There was just such a taboo on being an anime/video game fan, and doubly so if you were a girl—it’s weird to remember that now.

Why did people back then keep anime fandom a secret? Why was it especially important for girls to do so? Again, I don’t think I ever consciously thought about why it had to be such a secret, but I think I can break it down the reasons why I felt that way. There was very much a dislike of the “other,” that is to say, the “nerdy.” This very much only applied to anime and video games. Even what we thought of as the “normal” kids in our school were drawn to card games for a few years during elementary, and other kids actually admired me for reading so much. My brother and his friends were actually bullied to varying extents, though I didn’t know this until years later. At the same time, I was very much aware of how other, “normal” people viewed one particular friend of my brother, who was also happened to be the one who was the most open about loving anime (he wore anime-themed t-shirts, had anime pins on his backpack, etc.) (He was also, I learned later, the one who had been bullied the worst.)

Basically, the culture around me gave me the feeling that liking anime and video games was something to be looked down upon, though it’d never been stated to me in such terms. Furthermore, there was a sense that these were essentially “boy” interests—boy interests that should be mocked, yes, but something for boys all the same. So that compounded the problem for me: it was supposedly embarrassing to like these things, and even if it was going to hypothetically be okay for a boy to like them, I, as a girl, shouldn’t have been interested in them at all. I think I mentioned that I’d been close friends with a certain girl for two years before we found out that we were both closet anime and video game fans (and fairly passionate fans at that). I never asked her why she kept it a secret and she never asked me, and it was because it was something that we never needed to ask: it was something that we both took as a given.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? For me, the internet didn’t really play a role until I got into middle school. Any connection with fans happened only if you happened to meet someone who liked anime (which sometimes was a complicated thing to figure out, as my story in the above answer might suggest.)

What was online fandom like then? What sites and services did people converge around? Most of my online fandom interactions were in the context of fanfiction and the fanfiction-writing community. The very first site with anime fans on it that I discovered was called Quizilla. I believe that it no longer exists, but it was a website formed around user-created quizzes. Not all were fandom-related, not by a longshot—there were all sorts of quizzes with titles like “What color is your soul?” and “What animal are you?” and so on—but there were also fandom-related quizzes like “Which Yu Yu Hakusho character are you?” and “Which Inuyasha character would be your boyfriend?”

It was through this website that my friends and I discovered fanfiction. Quizilla definitely wasn’t created to host stories, but people posted them anyways. This is a bit difficult to explain, but I’ll try. Each chapter of a story was posted as its own “quiz” (and before Quizilla implemented a folder structure where you could group quizzes of a similar type, it was sometimes difficult to find each chapter in the right order on the writer’s page). People handled this in different ways: some posted the entire chapter text in the first question box, others split it up among questions boxes with the “answers” being used to track people’s reactions (i.e., “I like it so far, keep going!” could be the first answer option, while the second would be something like “Ugh, this sucks!”). The only way to track how many people read a story is if they went to the quiz results page, so some authors would post the last section of the chapter in the results in an effort to get people to click through, while others would try to tempt them with the promise of pretty/cute/sexy fanart (which they’d usually found through Google—crediting the original artists definitely wasn’t a big concern back then). Later, Quizilla did implement a story posting feature, and reactions among the writers were mixed: most of my friends (online and offline) and I were decidedly against it, though I no longer remember why.

Pretty much all the stories on Quizilla were self-inserts, and I believe that it was mostly younger fans in their teens who converged there. Most discussion took place through private messages, which were usually started when someone liked someone else’s story. Some people did put what were basically chat room widgets in the results pages of their stories, but most of what was posted there was feedback on the story itself, though sometimes actual discussion did occur. I think that Quizilla did implement message boards or community posts later on, but I never spent much time on them.

A couple of years later, I discovered fanfiction.net, and through it Livejournal. I still spent time on Quizilla, but I definitely began to fade out of it as my main online home in favor of Livejournal. I joined LJ when I was about 13, and I do think there was an older demographic there than there was on Quizilla: while there were plenty of people around my age and older, I don’t really recall anyone who was younger than me—at least, not who would admit to it—and there were plenty of people college aged and older. There was much more in-depth discussion there than on Quizilla, but also more discussion about our personal lives. I made friends on Quizilla, but I made many more on LJ, and the environment on there was definitely more conducive to that. At the same time, there was a stronger emphasis on pseudonyms than there is now. Only my closest friends learned my real name, for instance.

I also briefly spent some time in a general chatroom on an anime website. I’m not sure which one it was anymore. Both male and female anime fans talked there, most of them in their teens or early twenties, and fanfiction didn’t play a role in the discussions at all. There were also roleplaying communities on LJ and Proboards, but I didn’t really spend much time there, so I can’t say much about it.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
I’ve… actually never gone to a convention. I remember that I was D Y I N G to for most of middle school and high school, but all the conventions at the time were just too far away, and too much money for me to justify it with.

Have you been to any in-person fandom events, like a club? I was technically a member of my high school’s anime club for about two years, but it was a disappointing experience all around. It mostly comprised of everyone disagreeing about what anime to watch, and then watching nothing in the end. There was also a bit of an unwelcoming attitude there. For instance, my best friend at the time had a well-known love of Pikachu, and when we were tossing around ideas for a potential t-shirt for the club, many of the members thought it would be “hilarious” if some drew a picture of Goku killing Pikachu to use on the t-shirt. Yeah.

For many years I also attended a regular meet-up of card players at a local restaurant every Saturday, and while the focus was mostly on card games (all kinds, but the main one was initially Yu-Gi-Oh, and then Magic: The Gathering later on), many of them were fans of actual anime as well. Some of the memberships between these groups did overlap (though there were many more card-players than anime club members), and both very much had a boy’s club kind of atmosphere (my best friend at the time was the only other girl who attended the card-playing meet-ups), though I liked the card-player meet-ups better.

You said anime fandom, “was very male-dominated.” Is it different today? Why or why not? This is a bit of tricky question for me to answer, because the context in which I interact with anime fandom is so very different. Anime fandom was very male-dominated for me in my early years as a fan because I was almost entirely limited to interacting with anime fans in real life, and the majority of them (at least, the majority who would admit to be anime fans) were male. Even when I started interacting more with (mostly female) fans on the internet, I continued to know mostly male anime fans in real life. These days, I interact almost solely with female anime fans, but nearly all of those interactions occur online.

That being said, I do think it’s easier for me personally to be open about being an anime fan than it was when I was younger. If I worry about someone judging me for being an anime fan in real life, it’s because I’m worried that they’ll judge me for being someone who likes anime, period, not because they’ll judge for specifically being a girl who likes anime. In that sense, I do think the boundaries have broadened.

Age: 24

Location: San Antonio, Texas

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. My first experience was actually with manga. A friend of mine in middle school was reading Fruits Basket and thought I would enjoy it. I made note of it and a few months later made time to read a volume (I don’t think it was volume one). I believe this was around 8th grade. I was fascinated with the differences in the education system and culture and was hooked. I started reading tons of series and one of them lead me to watching my first anime. I think it was Ouran High School Host Club but I’m not 100% positive. (Technically my first anime was Sailor Moon or Pokemon but they did not register as anime at the time I was watching.) I went to high school and started watching more series with new friends such as Samurai Champloo.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The difference of culture between Japan and America fascinated me and lead me to focus on study international business law for a class in my senior year of high school. (I went to a business high school intending to pursue business law as a career which quickly shifted as I began reading more manga and watching more series of anime.) I have always been a very avid reader so manga played a larger part of the start of my fandom experience than anime. As I began to read more, my interests in the world at a global level began to grow because it made me view things through a different cultural lens.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? When I actually started getting into watching more anime in high school, the most popular title on campus with my friends was Hetalia. Season One had just finished airing and I was told it was something I had to watch and would enjoy. So I did and they were right. Naruto, Bleach, and Fullmetal Alchemist were also all popular at the time. (Of those three, the only one I watched was Fullmetal Alchemist).

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It wasn’t until I went to undergrad that I started interacting more with the fandom community. I joined my first anime club and got to know more fans. Our president at the time was from what she considered an older generation or the golden generation of fans. She prided herself on having been around fandom for a while. Her meetings were lecture-styled and provided an interesting perspective from a fan who had been around much longer. Unfortunately, she had an elitist tone and it was off-putting for a lot of people.

That same year I got to know some other people previously from the club and got to experience lots of different types of fans. Some were casual fans that lived by, “yeah it’s a thing I sometimes enjoy but if I didn’t have it it would be fine,” and others threw themselves wholeheartedly into their passions, creating elaborate cosplay costumes and attending conventions.

This was the first time I attended a convention. It was out of the city in Dallas, Texas and called Yule-Con. (I believe that it may have been the last year it was held). I meet fanfic writers and artists and enjoyed the convention. At the end of the year the president graduated and I became VP and Risk Manger of the organization and my soon-to-be roommate became president. That summer we attended A-kon in Dallas (my second convention). My now former president mentioned that she would one day like to see our college host an anime convention and I tucked that away to think on. At this point both conventions I had been to had been treated like shopping trips.

Once college started back up, we started running our meetings more like discussions than lectures and made sure the atmosphere was never one of discomfort or superiority. (Neither my roommate nor I were overly fond of the way the previous president had imposed or flaunted her superiority and we wanted our members to be comfortable sharing what they liked with us). Towards the end of the semester the convention was brought back up as a goal and I looked at my roommate and shrugged telling her if she wanted to do it we could make it happen now not one day in the future. So we asked our club members if that would be something they would be interested in hosting (most of them had never been to a convention) and when they said yes we got to work. We made reservations on campus and did a few hours of research to figure out where fandom people hung out in the city. We went out and met people (most slightly older than us) and started talking to them. The community was very relaxed, friendly and open to helping us host our first convention.

We held our first convention after planning for a bit less than a year and had about 200 people show up. The next year we did it again and had around 400 people show up. The weather was awful that day with severe rain and the community was used to college conventions being held outside so our attendance wasn’t as high as it could have been. Those that did come loved it both years and our school loved the event as well. We graduated that year and sadly the convention did not happen again after we had left. (Side note: we only spent money operating the con the first year, probably between $1,000-$1,500. It made enough to sustain itself the second year and had enough to pay for the third year, which unfortunately never happened.)

My former roommate, best friend, and I continued to go to conventions in San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. We just attended Sakura-Con in Seattle last weekend and what I can say is that every city has a unique feel to fandom. San Antonio is open about where to find fandoms and fandom related things both big and small; Dallas and some of the people from there (the president before us was from the area) held a feel of elitism in some aspects; Houston was harder to find fandom things in outside of the larger events.

We didn’t get to experience much of Seattle’s scene since we were only there a handful of days but we did notice a huge difference in the Lolita scene there (not anime I know but a small portion of the community still). The Lolitas from the Seattle area were much more open and friendly to experimenting with the fashion, making things yourself and not having to have name brand clothes to fit in. As opposed to the Lolita community we found in Texas, which is difficult to become involved in if you don’t have the money or figure to fit into a brand name or nearly brand name cord [Lolita speak for “coordinated outfit.”]

Fandom is very much what you make of it. My experience started off small where I would watch some shows illegally and read many things illegally (translations where slow to come out). Now we have so many ways to legally watch shows as they come out (paid or unpaid for a week delay) and translations and dubs are coming out at rapid speeds. Fandom access is definitely increasing and more fandom specific spaces are being created such as Ao3 [Archive of our Own, a fan-run, non-profit fanfiction archive.] Technology allows us to follow and filter through massive amounts of data easily to create our desired experience. At this point my biggest issue is I can’t actively visit an cafes [restaurants with anime themes] without a plane ticket to Japan. I use a forwarding service to order most of the products I want including Blu Rays for Yuri!!! on Ice and ACCA from Animate [Japan’s largest anime retail chain] for all the lovely exclusives. (Which, in retrospect, if I wasn’t spending thousands of dollars on merch, I’d have enough to spend a few weeks in Japan.)

My fandom experience is rather short lived as I only dabbled a little in high school and didn’t actively get involved until college. So if you count active involvement it’s been about 6 years, about 11 years since I first started reading manga, and 9 since I started fanning over things with groups of people.

Your early fandom experience was influenced by an anime club president who was a bit of a gatekeeper. In which ways did this inspire you to treat other fans better when you were in her position? Could you name some of the ways you worked to keep your club intentionally welcoming? I was raised to treat everyone equally, listen fairly to what they say, and judge based on their actions, not what they liked and disliked. Seeing people shut down because they were told they had bad taste didn’t sit very well with me or my now best friend so we decided that we would make sure nobody felt bad about what series they liked even if we didn’t care for them ourselves.

We made sure to let everyone have a chance to speak and let the club members decide some of the topics they wanted covered. We also made sure to ask them if they wanted parties for holidays and what kind of foods they wanted. We had some vegan club members so I made sure there were things they could eat and would bake a lot of things from scratch or adapt box mixes to leave out ingredients they couldn’t eat.

We would let them vote on what series they wanted to watch and ask their opinions about things and even held a couple of Socratic style discussions where we provided materials before the meeting for them to look over and form opinions about so we could discuss the effects it had on fandom. (One of these was the Aurora Colorado Batman movies shooting) we always made sure to have an open door policy if they needed to talk to us about anything at almost anytime (the biggest exception being when we were in class).

We made sure they could use us as both a resource and a support system and would invite club members to have dinner with us occasionally when we cooked. There would be nights when I made dinner for about 10 people or so depending on who was available and wanted to come.

Amazing to hear about the format of your college anime club (mine just watched anime, no discussion at all)! Can you tell me more about that and whether your alma mater still does it that way? I haven’t been back in about two years and leadership has changed. I think discussion-wise they are still doing things the same way but I think the way the club is managed has changed to reflect the current leadership. One of the club members at least ended up leaving due to the effects of the new leadership because she didn’t feel as welcome. The person we left in charge had a very different style than we did and I believe she should have graduated this year. I didn’t end undergrad on the best of terms with her because of a personal matter and the way she treated my best friend, the club member that ended up leaving the organization and myself after we were already making the transitional process.

I think it’s fascinating that you found different regional “pockets” of fandom with different vibes. Do you think the internet has made fandom more homogenous, why or why not? I think the internet has made it easier to find people with the same tastes and opinions but it hasn’t made it homogenous. People will always have different opinions based on their own experiences. What the internet has done is made it easier for people to attack things they don’t like or agree with. Your experiences very much depend on how you navigate your own online browsing. Some people have very diverse social media profiles while others fall into a very homogenous pool. It’s very easy to filter your online experience to be what you want it to be. Things like this depend on the person, the platform the use and how they control their viewing experiences.

How did you discover Lolita subculture? Was it related to your interest in anime? It was definitely connected to anime and manga. I probably read something or saw something and started looking into the fashion. I haven’t invested yet because it costs a fair amount to buy most of the dresses and it’s difficult to find things that will fit properly over the internet. Most likely I will need to buy things in person or make them myself and that’s a little advanced for where my skills currently sit.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I think there is a much bigger push to support things legally now. Crunchyroll and Funimation have worked really hard to make a large number of series available to people outside of Japan. You can find things easier now than you used to be able to and they are working to bring things even quicker. We still have problems getting more of the anime movies brought over but series aren’t as hard to find. You don’t have to settle for what’s airing on tv because now we have 20+ series being done every season. Streaming has made life easier in a lot of ways and also helps support creators.

Britanee can be reached on Twitter.